AOL's Newsroom Is Now Bigger Than The New York Times's

Here's a startling statistic about the enormous bet AOL is making on content:

AOL's newsroom is now bigger than the New York Times'.

Come again?

AOL's news and content operation now has three main parts:
Huffington Post, Patch, and the legacy AOL brands and sites. At
last count, Patch had about 800 editorial staffers, Huffpo about
200, and the rest of AOL about 300.

Add all those together and you get ~1,300, which is more than the
New York Times' ~1,200.

Given that massive investment, the next question is whether AOL
is deploying these 1,300 folks in the best way possible.

We'd say no. And that's because we're still very skeptical
about the prognosis for Patch, AOL's huge bet on local that the
company is losing $120 million -$160 million a year on.

We just don't see how the Patch numbers work: Gaining enough
traffic in each local market with 1-2 editors and then selling
small ads in that market efficiently and repeatedly just seems
extremely challenging.

We're very optimistic about the prognosis for Huffington Post,
though!

So, imagine if, instead of betting ~800 folks and ~$160 million a
year on Patch, AOL made the same dollar and personnel commitment
to Huffington Post. Those 800 people could build out Huffpo
internationally and locally. They could go after some of the same
advertising dollars that Patch is going after, but do it with a
nationally recognized brand and more centralized sales force.

This, we think, would produce a rapid and much less speculative
return. It would also likely soon make Huffington Post one of the
largest web sites in the world. And the advertising dollars would
follow.

But even with these 70 new journalists, Huffpo's newsroom will
still be woefully understaffed when compared with the New York
Times's.

So imagine if Arianna took the money AOL is currently investing
in Patch and hired ~500 international journalists instead? (The
sorts of folks Arianna is hiring cost more than Patch staffers.)
Huffington Post would suddenly become one of the most important
and largest original news producers in the world!